Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2006. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - November 20, 2006
Elizabeth A. Kennedy
D'Agostino had been hospitalized for a week with abdominal pain and died after surgery, said Sister Mary Owens, who has worked at the Nyumbani Orphanage since it opened in 1992, just outside Kenya's capital of Nairobi.
"He was very inspiring, he always pushed you beyond your comfort zones," Owens told The Associated Press. "He was very much a man of compassion, he was mirroring the compassion of God. He reached out to everybody."
D'Agostino - known at the orphanage as "Father D'Ag" - opened Nyumbani with just three HIV-positive children.
"They were babies, abandoned in hospital," Owens said. "It was a day of tremendous joy when we finally welcomed the first three children."
A native of Providence, Rhode Island, D'Agostino spent two years as a surgeon with the U.S. Air Force before joining the Jesuits in 1955. He traveled to Africa as part of the Jesuit Refugee Service, using Nairobi as a base to travel to Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zaire, now Congo.
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki sent a letter of condolences after D'Agostino's death, saying he "distinguished himself as a great Christian who worked diligently in serving vulnerable members of society and propagating the Christian faith."
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